Kill Stories

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  2010-06-06 Started this page

• Kill story (anonymous)

My story must be 25 years old now, but I can confirm I killed a PET at high school through an accidental killer poke, which I had thought an urban myth till then!

This was shortly after the release of the ZX Spectrum computer game, 'Jet Set Willy'. One of the interesting features of this game (for its day) was a rope swing the character would have to jump on to pass certain screens.

I thought the idea of trying to animate a rope swing on the PET sounded fun, so I coded it up in our computer lab over a lunch hour (computer time was very limitted, it is hard to realise what a limitted resource computers were to an 80s high school!)

The program worked much better than expected, giving me some very impressive high-res graphics from the text-only commodore screen. I was impressed, but confused. After 5 minutes of this display, the screen went black. When it did not respond, I duly turned the PET off, waited 10 seconds, and turned it on again. The screen was resolutely blank, not a flicker. I turned the power off again for a good 60 seconds before one final reboot, and then as any responsible high school student who believes he has just broken something incredibly expensive would do, I quietly left the lab hoping no-one noticed! (I carry the shame to this day!)

I noticed that PET was out of commission for a few months, and when eventually it did return to service, it only had half the memory that it had before.

I don't know that the actual killer poke was, but in hindsight I realised I ad animated a beautiful rope swing, but had forgotten to add the offset to the start of the screen, so actually ran my animation through some very low memory addresses.

Contrary to popular rumours, there was no spontaneous catching of fire, just one very blank screen.